Listening has become a rare skill. In a visual and written world we are losing our ability to pay close attention to what we hear so we can respond to what is happening in new ways. We react to situations mostly based on memory because we are not aware of our thinking.

In contrast, listening is the interpretative action taken by the listener in order to understand and potentially make meaning out of the sound waves.

Listening can be understood on three levels: alerting, deciphering, and an understanding of how the sound is produced and how the sound affects the listener.

Although most of us acknowledge the importance of listening to improve our understanding, learn new things, and enjoy new experiences, when it comes to the actual doing, we fall short.

This is probably because nobody teaches us how to listen explicitly. We are born, develop a sense for what is dangerous in our environment, then fine tune our ability to turn off some of the stuff we find distracting. But we hardly learn how to turn off our thought process and memories to have direct experiences of situations in real time.

We cannot respond to new situations when we hold onto what we may remember happening in previous ones.

Jumping to conclusions

In Dialogue: The Art Of Thinking Together William Isaacs says, “one of the ways we sustain the culture of thinking alone is that we form conclusions and then do not test them, treating our initial inferences as facts.” Which may be one of the most common reasons that prompts us to notice that history repeats itself.

To illustrate the dangers of basing our thinking on a personal assessment and not direct experience Isaacs recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis. He says:

Some thirty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, several academics brought together the Russian, Cuban, and American leaders in charge at the time of the crisis to reflect on the causes of this near-devastating conflict.

A series of three meetings were held in Boston, Moscow, and Havana. Included on the Russian side were Ambassador Dobrynin, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, and son of Nikita Khrushchev, and the Soviet generals responsible for installing the missiles in Cuba. American participants included Robert McNamara, Ted Sorenson and other members of Kennedy's inner circle, and for the Cubans, Fidel Castro himself.

Simply getting these leaders together was an important step toward greater dialogue about international conflict. Their meetings revealed some important facts not previously understood or well known, and shed light on the disastrous consequences of drawing conclusions.

One important component of this crisis was the fact that the Cubans installed missiles without notice ninety miles off the coast of the United States. A U-2 spy plane caught sight of these and noted one striking fact: There was no camouflage on them. It seemed to some in Kennedy's inner circle that the Soviets were aggressively moving forward, not even bothering to camouflage their missile installations.

Thirty years later another side of the story emerged. As it turns out, the Russian army, which installed the missiles, was accustomed to installing missiles in Russia, where there was no need for camouflage. Like any good military bureaucracy, when ordered to install missiles in Cuba, they did it the way they normally did: without camouflage.

Some three decades later in conversation, the Russian general in charge of the installation made it quite clear that there was no ulterior intent in leaving the camouflage off. What was taken by some as clear evidence of aggressive intent was essentially based on an erroneous presumption.

When we draw abstract inference from our experience, we miss new data. But that is not all. When we jump to conclusions, we then progress from the conclusions to assumptions we make about subjects, and adopt the results as beliefs. Once we get to the belief stage, we entrench ourselves into a position, thus making it much harder for us to change our stance. In this sense, beliefs are limiting.

Paying attention to the actual “data” that precedes our conclusions can help us improve the quality of our inquiring mind.

Figuring out what's missing

How do we overcome our automatic patterns we've contributed to building over time? What can we do to become more realistic about our actual experiences?

What should we do to improve our listening skills?

Thinking slow

Paying attention to how we listen is not easy because the landscape of our memories is filled with things, sometimes painful, we can readily recall. “Disturbance,” from an emotional situation that happened in the past, for example, “usually leads people to listen in a way that is self-confirming: They look for evidence that they are right and others are wrong.”

Looking to disprove

Learning to use discomfort as a lever to look deeper into its cause can help us see what we've missed. Are we the source of the difficulty? Is there a memory of a similar situation that occurred in the past that we are imposing on others who were not part of it? “Listening in this case becomes reflective,” says Isaacs. “We begin to see how others are experiencing the world.”

Minding the gap

Are we walking the talk? Do we do what we say consistently? Have we examined our actions to see if we are creating the problem? “No one acts consistently with their words,” says Isaacs. “Some of us are more aware than others of how large this gap is, how systematic it is.”

Noticing resistance

We can learn to observe our reactions to what someone else is saying without fully embracing them, to keep them at some distance. Are we projecting our opinions onto them? Is our distortion shield on to protect ourselves from new information? Isaacs says, “If you watch, you may find that there is an almost irrepressible tape in your mind that plays, especially when you feel a reaction to another.”

Standing still

We're so used to hitting the ground running that we have not cultivated the ability to pause. When we quiet our mental chattering and physical busying, we are able to let the information sink in. We may even find this a very relaxing stance. “Think of this as calming the surface of the waters of our experience,” says Isaacs. “So we can see below to the depths.”

A world of possibilities

When we are in a hurry, we should slow down. This is a piece of advice my mother gave me a long time ago —it works. It was probably something her mother taught her. There is a reason why popular sayings continue to be, well, popular. They are a simple synthesis of hard-earned wisdom.

Poet David Wagoner captures the advice a Native American elder gives a child lost in the woods, “Stand still, the trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost.” We can find our way when we take our place as part of it —by staying still, noticing resistance, minding the gap, looking to disprove, and thinking slow.

Neal Stephenson is an author of speculative fiction who weaves minutely detailed historical and technical information into his complex stories, usually combining it with a wicked sense of humor.

His ground-breaking novels include Snow Crash, which weaves virtual reality with Sumerian myth, Cryptonomicon, which leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, and Anathem, which transports readers into an alternate universe where scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians live in seclusion behind ancient monastery walls until they are called back into the world to deal with a crisis of astronomical proportions.

Stephenson's passion for history is also evident in his Baroque Cycle novels, Vol. 1 Quicksilver, which focus on key people and events in the development of science across many cultures in the 17th and 18th centuries. While science fiction is not on everyone's reading list, history should be.

Some of the books on Stephenson's recommended reading list are more accessible than others to non-mathematicians:

The Odyssey by Homer in (Penguin Classics) the English translation of Robert Fagles —the story of Odysseus is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. From the reviews, it looks like Fagles did justice to the Greek edition we read and loved in high school.

The Iliad by Homer in (Penguin Classics) the English translation of Robert Fagles —dating back to the ninth century B.C. this book conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. As is the case with any book written in another language, the role of the translator cannot be overstated. While we read the poem in the original Greek, many have found this edition excellent.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 1-6 by Edward Gibbon —it contains the history of Rome's demise from its height (around the 1st century) to/through the dark/middle ages (to around 1500A.D.), with a sweeping and astonishing view of a period of history that still has no equal. If you ever travel to Rome and walk from the Altar of the Fatherland to the Coliseum, the wall to your right will show you the maps of the Empire whose expansion and demise Gibbon describes in these books.

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes —a classic of political philosophy divided into four major sections: 1./ of man, in which he discusses human nature and why civilized people prefer peace to war; 2./ of Common-wealth, in which Hobbes first talks about the several forms of government and the pros and cons of each; 3./ of the Christian Common-wealth, the longest section, in which Hobbes accepts the Bible as the word of God and quotes from it numerous time to bolster his position in support of a powerful government; 4./ of the Kingdome of Darknesse, the shortest section, in which Hobbes veers away from the topic of government and instead focuses on religious practices and beliefs of the day that he deems improper and inconsistent with the Bible.

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose —the most complete mathematical explanation of the universe yet published. It begins with the deceptively simple geometry of Pythagoras and the Greeks and the fundamentals to the complex-number calculus, Riemann surfaces, and Clifford bundles, the tour takes readers to the nature of spacetime.

“Boredom is a mask frustration wears,” says Stephenson. When we make the deliberate choice of thinking and reflecting on things, we get ideas and time. Understanding history and where we came from, can go a long way at helping us create the best possible future.

What is real and what is the product of our mental storytelling? We discover the gap between our perception of work, life, and events and the real story (or a more real one) when we engage curiosity. Why is that so? How can we find out?

Beyond the obvious, which is we see the world based on internal filters and environment, there is an element of us trying to protect ourselves from the information. Because maybe once we come into contact with it —or with the someone who has a different version of the story— we need to change in some respects. When we come out on the other side of change we call it transformation, but going through it can be painful.

The process of change unearths aspects of us we may not know or be ready to acknowledge. We may find we are utterly different from what we expected —it's true of others as we get to know them better, would it not be true of ourselves?

This is why conversation is such a powerful discovery tool. Through it, we can learn to appreciate different points of view about a situation, for example. We can learn about how certain events unfolded based on the recollections of other people who were there. In turn, these narratives are based on their vantage point, role, skills, and experience.

A conversation of genius and curiosity

Whenever we think about conversation today, our mind probably goes to interviews. Skilled interviewers have this knack of asking good questions to elicit information from guests. Many of us who work as strategists and experience designers are also researches, we focus on learning how to phrase questions to uncover usable data about a company, product, and/or service, for example.

Practice can teach us to ask better questions, and it is more effective when we are curious about the answers. Which makes hard questions worth pursuing without trying to “fill in” either verbally or in our mind. To discover new information, rather than having a sort of conversation with ourselves, we need to join the one we are holding with others in real time.

Easier said than done.

A conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Brian Grazer is a good example. The narrative device is using the names of people the two have met to talk about the stories each discovered in order to write about them in their most recent books.

Brian Grazer had just written A Curious Mind with Charles Fishman. In the book, the Hollywood producer reveals how he got started meeting with people from diverse backgrounds to have open-ended conversations about their lives and work. The theme being that curiosity is secret to a bigger life.

Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what happens when ordinary people confront giants. We are quite familiar with the theme of underdogs and misfits winning the day from history and psychology.

Because their conversation is about how they met the people they write about and what they learned from and about them, Gladwell and Grazer's hour-long conversation is a good prompter for those of us who want to understand how to relate to others.

Whether we seek to discover new information, or learn about someone, even when that someone is a member of our own family we think we already know, there are many pointers in the video below. My take aways include:

how people may be utterly different from how we perceive them, especially when the media is involved —in the story Brian Grazer tells about Michael Jackson and his gloves

how dyslexia may be overcome in part by having others believe in our abilities and why grandparents may be our best hope —Gladwell's research into older stories led him to attribute dyslexia being more of a non issue also because of the education system not being a factor in labeling children

the tremendous value of learning to see people for who they really are without preconceived notions of who they should be —Brian Grazer again in the story about his grandmother

how once we gain some experience, we are able to look back and appreciate people and events in our lives because we are more distant from our biases of who is important afterwards —Gladwell's learned about who his grandmother really was, while he “he saw none of it” growing up

The experience of having the conversation is likely one of the most satisfying we can have in our lives. Which is why it's puzzling how we try to minimize them in our hurried days, especially at work where they can help us make sense of problems and uncover opportunities.

Conversations are an important aspect of our social lives. Conversations are most meaningful when they reverse our understanding of the world. Which is why they are such powerful discovery tools.

But only when we join them in real time.

Our memory is selective

We are often under the spell of our own narrative fallacy. We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, that is to reduce the dimension of things. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “the fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to over-interpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths.”

It's hard to avoid interpretation because our brain functions —our Operating System— often work outside our awareness. As scientific research on the stronghold habits have on us shows, how they overcome our willpower, even when we are convinced we have changed something we are operating at “App level,” we have not really impacted the Operating System (our brain).

Habits run us, and so does our personal narrative as it renders in the background. Which has an impact on how we construct our reality. Our job, then becomes to reconstruct and distinguish between the story we tell ourselves and the real thing (or as close to real as possible).

This is why conversations with different people is valuable in understanding how a business operates, in addition to direct observation of what people do vs. what they say.

Ability to talk about issues and opportunities underscores the importance of collaboration. Grazer says that meeting his long-time business partner Ron Howard has helped him make better choices. We should all be that lucky in business —and in our lives.

The Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification, the randomness. Which can come back to blind-side us, or worse create havoc later because we saw none of it at the time we were making our decisions.

In addition to learning to make better decisions, we should appreciate the power of conversation as a discovery tool, use it smartly to suspend judgement and not try to fit data points into a neat narrative at least long enough to have enough information to make sense of things.

We want to be told stories, but we should become more aware of our very own “reality distortion field” (an expression often used in conjunction with Steve Job's highly persuasive skills).

We use warmth and competence as human data to decide who to trust because they help us answer two critical live saving questions:

1./ what are another person's intentions?

2./ can they make good on those intentions?

The characteristics of warmth include traits like morality, trustworthiness, sincerity, kindness, and friendliness; those of competence include efficacy, skill, creativity, confidence, and intelligence.

The Cuddy et al schema allows social psychologists to disaggregate the notion of prejudice, which is too often conceived merely as an us vs. them phenomenon — “My in-group is superior to your out-group.” It’s not that simple, says Cuddy, “That [binary] model predicts almost nothing about the treatment of an out-group. Not prejudice, the emotional component, and not discrimination, the behavioral component.”

In short, distinct types of discrimination follow each warmth-by-competence combination.

Cuddy found that body language affects how others see us —and how we see ourselves. For example, “A lot of what reveals lying happens below the neck,” says Cuddy. “Lying leaks out physically. To come across as authentic, your verbal and nonverbal behavior must be synchronized.”

The link to competence is based on physical dominance. Leaning in is a low dominance pose, for example. Which is why it makes for a bad metaphor if we seek to provide advice to groups that are already facing an uphill battle in perception, for example women.

We also treat people based on our expectations of them. We should be careful of creating the conditions that make the stereotypes we hold a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts we use when we have nothing to lose, says Cuddy.

For example, top leaders in organizations don't risk much when they confuse one person for another or see everyone under them as the same. They see themselves as separate from everyone else. The incentives they receive reinforce this perception.

Because the smartest person in the room is often the room itself when we recognize the value of collaboration and connection we are able to get better at creating more. That increases the value of our contribution.

The mind is a subject of eternal fascination. We remember things we never experienced, and with Google just one short click away, we may think we know more than we do. Learning to think for ourselves is a good first step to help us self-assess. We can ask for feedback, but often business relationships and social constructs blunt the more useful data points.

Knowing we don't know

American author and aphorisms writer William Feather once wrote that being educated means, “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” Professions like engineering, law, and medicine, which have a clear set of fixed and knowable rules and a process for continuing education make it easier to tell what one knows and what they don't.

However, when it comes to professions that require more general knowledge and a greater deal of soft skills like marketing, communications, sales, economics, business strategy, and recruiting for example, it is much easier to hide behind a carefully constructed wall of ignorance. Harder to spot for ourselves as well as for others. Ironically, these professions require a higher degree of thinking and a broader capacity to live with ambiguity.

When we ask Google what is the opposite of learning, we find the word ignorance. That is the condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed.

Professor David Dunning, says it is possible to be both unskilled an unaware of it. Dunning is one of the researchers who coined the term and as a scientist he continues to add to our understanding of the phenomenon. Dunning says#:

“In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.”

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dunning and then graduate student Justin Kruger published a paper that documented how, “in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.”

The value of uncluttering

Poor performers, in other words, cannot recognize their lack of skill because they lack the skill to assess what having this skill would entail. Further in the article, Dunning says:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous.

We should learn to value reaching an understanding of the limits of what we know, understanding how far our circle of competence stretches, and becoming more humble about what we still need to figure out.

According to Socrates (attribution), “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” But knowledge workers have a harder time making that one stick —our livelihood depends on the commercial value of what we do know.

Ignorance is bliss, but that may not be a good thing for us.

How to stop sabotaging ourselves

Compounding our errors can make a small problem become a big risk factor for our credibility and reputation.

When we are curious to find out if we are creating the problem we can tell by looking at the data —are we the only constant in what is otherwise a pattern? For example, when organizations have trouble retaining skilled individual contributors they may look at the constants like management or how they make decisions.

In an article# at The Guardian, psychotherapist Philippa Perry deconstructs Groundhog Day, the movie, to help us see how we sabotage ourselves. The story is set in Punxsutawne where weatherman Phil Connors lives the same day over and over again, until he figures out how to live it more intentionally.

Perry says:

When we first meet Connors, played by Bill Murray, whatever happened to him in his past has made him grumpy, sarcastic, antisocial and rude. He is trapped in the narcissistic defense of assuming he is superior to everyone else and we see people being circumspect around him and not enjoying his company. In psychotherapy, we often talk about “self-fulfilling prophecy” – if you expect everyone not to like you, you behave defensively and, hey presto, your prophecy comes true. Being trapped in the same day is a metaphor for how he is stuck in this pattern.

Although the movie is 101 minutes in length, director Ramis stated in the DVD commentary that he believed 10 years pass. He says, Ramis wrote, “I think the 10-year estimate is too short. It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and allotting for the down time and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years.”

Valuable lessons take time to absorb, more time yet when we are unwilling participants or blissfully ignorant of our role in perpetrating the illusion we are working on tree-ideas, the stuff that makes history, when instead what we have are weed-ideas, the stuff that clutters.

Says Perry:

The tradition of Punxsutawney is that if the groundhog, also called Phil, can see its shadow on Groundhog Day, the town will get six more weeks of winter. It takes Phil the weatherman quite a long time to see his shadow too, but when at last he does, the day miraculously moves on.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” says Socrates. We are better off when we learn to recognize our ignorance.

“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

[Steven Pressfield]

Regardless of whether we consider ourselves artists, maybe others see us that way because we are able to add that special twist to things that just makes them work. It takes years of practice to learn to separate bedrock from sand.

Professionals are in the business of making stuff vs. finding stuff. They commit full-time and are resilient over time. They do this despite the “isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation” they may experience.

It took Yourcenar 27 years to write Memoirs of Hadrianand thanks to her we are still learning from an emperor in many languages way passed the publication date. There's no expiration date on history, or friendship when they are forged one brick at a time.

Valuable things still take time to do

Technology has accelerated the speed at which we can talk about stuff. But quality products and results still come from quality thinking, doing —and grit.

Relationships take time to set. Good ideas take time to develop and execute. They are like trees, where a lot is going on underground before we see anything come to fruition.

What grows fast?

Weed-ideas.

Weed-ideas:

leave unpleasant marks

are a nuisance — e.g., poison ivy

compete with tree-ideas for nutrients, light, and water

harbor pests like insects and diseases

are hard to get rid of once they take hold

Weed-ideas tend to be very competitive. They spread fast and are generally a problem in areas where tree-ideas are not plentiful or on soil that has been disturbed.

The alternative to weed-ideas is tree-ideas. Which we cannot find on Google.com, but we can grow over time.

We want to spend more of our time doing things that work and less on failing. To do that, we need to become more of what we are. Because of our biases and assumptions, we learn more from the feedback we receive from others. Which takes some parsing, as others are also focused on self.

Our methods should helps us experiment and iterate to build momentum. This is preferable to testing, although that is valuable downstream, after the iteration, to optimize where we net out. The first is about expanding options by enlarging our horizon, the second involves picking one among the options we have. Starting with the first is a good idea. But how?

The other side of the problem is that there is only so much information we can retain and use on short notice. Which is why some of the smartest people continue to bet on building their capacity to become more effective at what they do by thinking better. “Measure twice, cut once,” say wise carpenters.

With customers, and increasingly prospects, we don't get a second chance to make a first impression. All too often we have no idea of why we missed the mark. With enough products and services ready to do any one job, the emphasis has shifted squarely to the realm of experience. A fuzzy area to control.

While it's hard to predict the qualities of the next hit campaign, product, or hot news item, it is easier than ever to learn what people think about a certain type of service and what's missing or appreciated in existing products. The information is everywhere, and especially in reviews and conversations.

For all the recent talk about consumer generated content and customer-centric businesses, the opportunity for companies to learn and gain insights is still wide open.

How to turn knowledge into data

Reading reviews and conversations online is like going to the school of life. If we only pay attention to the keywords and numbers, we may miss the whole point —the experience. Why do people say what they say? How do we draw insights from disparate comments? Is it possible to separate a fad from a trend?

There is a lot of human data in conversations, starting with the questions people ask. How to listen is the most valuable skill that nobody teaches. Insights require imagination and creativity, and while we can automate and optimize a lot using modern tools, we expand our options when we include good decisions in the mix.

research and deep insight into the operational and/or organizational reality of a specific challenge customers face

a novel approach or method to address the challenge, including making the case to address potential objections on shortcomings

examples of coherent applications of the proposed method to high-stakes situations corroborated by facts and solid logic

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In a webinar for Target Marketing this week, I provided some ideas on how to turn knowledge into data by parsing information in customer reviews, conversations, and comments. You can find my deck below, and listen to the full recording of the webcast on demand, which includes tons of data from BazaarVoice and a success story about Rubbermaid.

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There are many good reasons to listen to what others are saying. Online, companies can learn about product ideas, what their competitors are doing, how service differentiates them, and what makes a great experience.

While organizations worry about their brands and business, as people we think about our credibility and reputation. Take for example wines. The most common questions we have are about wanting to have a great experience and not look bad —how do I figure out which wines to buy for different occasions? How can I discover new wines? Wines like the ones I enjoyed?

Experts build a reputation so they can make recommendations on our behalf —do it for me. Apps like Delectable and Vivino help us find wines based on ratings, save them, upload our own preferences and return data about us to us —do it for us plus do it for myself. As marketers and tool builders, we can provide value based on what people are trying to do —find new wines, match the occasion to the vintage, figure out what is similar — and in turn generate value for the business.

Then there is a third option —that of upgrading the customer. Teaching people how to learn about their own taste by demystifying the process, and helping people have fun while they are getting smarter. Humor helps people feel connected —they say laughter is the shortest distance between two people. By upgrading the customer we earn preference because we have permission to interact.

Our customers have more sources of information than ever before, but so do we. We can choose to address issues and learn from the experiences of other companies and brands as well. The very tools that empower buyers can become a source of additional information for us —on behavior. Which creates more options for marketers to display information that helps customers make choices better.

In other words —connection is a two-way opportunity. For example, when we think of it as a service, we can help people see what people like them are doing, eliminate unnecessary steps between people and what they want to do, and making it easier to do things.

Consciously and/or unconsciously we use decisions as a way to show and confirm to ourselves who we are. And our identity is connected with our behaviors, but our answers depend on context. By now we mostly understand that there is a trade-off between being connected, staying informed and our privacy. but that trade-off comes with strings attached —we expect more from organizations and brands.

People bring their whole selves to experiences, and their tribes as well. Marketers are familiar with the concept of persona —who she is, what she does, and so on. We use these stories to ground our work into real people with observations of what they actually do rather than just what they say.

But how can we figure out what they actually want? What's in their heads? It starts with our thinking —we need to take into account the larger context of their lives. When we start with why, we can figure out “what” and help with “how.”

Our point of view is still very much business-centric, even when we talk up customer-centric —when we say “world-class customer service,” for example, as companies we mean “world-class service,” while customers want “world-class customer.” How do we make them and their lives better? That elicits the best kind of consumer generated content available.

We won’t get there by misbehaving —we need to learn to go beyond the stars, and learn to translate emotion transmitted via words into data (what we call human data). The Amazon algorithm is still learning. But as people, we can learn faster, if we want to —from each other.

Organizations look at people as new forms of media, so when they see a great article about a competitor's product march to their agency, “I want some of that.” When we shift the focus from the article or media coverage to the underlying qualities of the story we can make more headway than just trying to buy “influencers.”

How some organizations and brands get to “word of obvious” is still not sinking in —we need to change our approach. Are we still having relationships locked inside our CRM system while trying to operate in a networked marketplace? Relationships are much more important than transactions to people, and now they have the tools to demonstrate it.

Which is why when brands don't walk the talk, talk is cheap; why surveys are still about the brand while reviews are about experiences —who and what would we rather talk about? How quickly can we get to that composer box to have our say?

Amazon didn’t invent people, they just make it easier for existing behavior to manifest itself. Sites that enable product reviews sell more, gather better product feedback and higher credibility. Because the data is right there —in the reviews. “Not quite” means I can learn something (and there is a give and take with a product guarantee, so people will more likely help that brand.)

Reputation is earned. Service is still special in social for two main reasons: 1./ a clean slate for companies, 2./ smart brands get that everyone is watching. Which is why people do post to social networks when they struck out in regular channels or are frustrated enough.

People are more than capable of filtering the noise. But are brands flexible? For example, the star rating cannot be changed on Amazon when updating the review, it requires entering a new review. A technical issue that could impact the reputation of an author or brand —what is the Amazon’s incentive to fix it?

Retaliating for negative reviews is not a good idea. How far does it get us when we do this kind of thing to another person? The best way to go about that is to reflect on the underlying behavior and provide incentive to do the right thing, instead.

Most of the problems we can spot is reviews are about (not) keeping promises. One obvious place were we can spot the issue is in peer marketplaces like Kickstarter. We can learn what are the words that work to fund projects, for example. Studying patterns in peer marketplaces are also a great way to uncover which products work and to understand the importance of building an audience first.

But then we have to deliver, or people will tell each other where else you can go for a similar item. We're helpful that way, social animals. We can try the shortcuts, or we can take a longer view, which still leaves plenty of room to build relationships the right way and grow a company's business.

“Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiment, tends to create a new environment.”

[Marshall McLuhan]

Every technical innovation creates a new environment that alters the inner image or identity of entire cultures. To go beyond the stars, we need to learn to go beyond the product or service to the larger context of work and life. This is how we should build experiences, so we can upgrade the customer, which is what she/he wants. By converging message and service we can bypass the competition altogether.

To listen to the full recording of the webcast on demand go here, it includes tons of data from BazaarVoice, success story about Rubbermaid, and the Q&A with participants in listening mode during the webcast.

Einstein predicted Gravitational Waves 100 years ago, and their existence has now been confirmed. “If scientists are still doing his homework from a 100 years ago,” says Stephen Colbert. He must have been pretty smart.

Astrophysicist Brian Greene explains that gravitational waves are essentially ripples in the fabric of space, like what we see when we throw a pebble into a pond. Except for the waves occur in space itself.

Einstein discovered general relativity in 1915, a year earlier. He found that gravity comes from warps and curves in the fabric of space. The sun warps the space and keeps the earth in orbit like on a trampoline.

But Einstein didn't stop there, says Greene:

Imagine kids running on a trampoline, what happens is their movements keep sending ripples on the surface. The physicist said the same should be true of the fabric of space. When we have two rapidly orbiting stars or black holes, Einstein's math predicts that they will generate a steady march of ripples in the fabric of space.

Those are gravitational waves that he predicted mathematically.

Einstein's math shows that as a gravitational wave ripples by anything it will stretch it and compress it.

The simulation is exaggerated. Greene says the stretching and compression happens in a diameter of an atom scale. This was detected by a sophisticated detector known as LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory#:

It’s a discovery nearly a quarter-century in the making: LIGO was spearheaded by Caltech and MIT in 1992, and now involves nearly 1000 researchers from the UK, Germany, Australia, and beyond. With a total cost of more than $600 million, LIGO is the largest project ever funded by NSF.

Making something visual to explain something complex like scientific information helps people see it in their mind's eye. Which comes as close as we can to them internalizing what it is without needing to know all the technical aspects of how we got there.

At any one time we are having a conversations, we are actually in two of them —one with someone else, and one with ourselves. When the person in conversation with us makes it easier to understand them because they use clear language and translate the complexity for us, we need to talk less to ourselves in our heads to try and make sense of what they are saying. Which is why we can pay more attention to their message.

For knowledge workers this is a key skill to develop. Reading quality material and writing a lot both help us learn how to think more clearly, but it is our experience in doing things that drives the point home —for us when we try to teach someone else.

Greene can explain gravitational waves simply because he understands the mathematical information behind them. Hence the visualization. It is in the actual doing that he can demonstrate how discovery works. He knows the tools, and how to use them. In other words, he operates from his circle of competence.

Circle of competence is Warren Buffett's belief# that an investor's best strategy is to select an area where they can know significantly more than the average investor, and focus their efforts on that area. His partner Charlie Munger says, “We know the edge of our competency better than most.”

Knowing how far one can go is valuable in business. We do well when we build our business based on our circle of competence, and have mixed results when we don't. We can learn to think better and by engaging in deliberate practice, figure out how far we want to expand our circle of competence. We may get the math right, and take a very long time for the rest of the work to show its compounding effects.

Watch the entertaining and informative conversation about gravitational waves below.

“Like everyone else, I have had at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exists; and books, with the particular errors in perspective to which they inevitably give rise.

I have read nearly everything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter are considered frivolous; and to such reading I owe perhaps more instruction than I have gathered in the somewhat varied situations of my own life.

The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.

But books lie, even those that are most sincere.

[...]

The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable.

The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformation as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced.

Historians propose to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been entirely true;

[...]

Direct observation of man is a method still less satisfactory, limited as it frequently is to the cheap reflections which human malice enjoys.

[...]

Almost everything that we know about anyone else is at second hand.”

The procedures for gaining knowledge about others and our selves are difficult, they require both self-awareness and a high degree of detachment. Like emperor Hadrian, we tend to replace evidence-based reflection with habits. We fit the opinions and judgements of others on our frame as best we can and make do.

Yourcenar conceived the book in 1924, resumed her work in 1934. She destroyed the first draft and kept only one sentence from the second. The work resumed in 1937, then in 1939 and from that year to 1948 the project was abandoned. “Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit,” says Yourcenar in her reflections on the composition. “I fell into making, and then re-making, this portrait of a man who was almost wise.”

How is it possible for a woman to write in first person, in the voice of a man? “The rules of the game: learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything, while at the same time adapting to one's ends the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, or the method of Hindu ascetics, who for years, and to the point of exhaustion, try to visualize ever more exactly the images which they create beneath their closed eyelids.”

We should be ready to reconcile two contradictory ideas, to see them as phases or stages in the same complex human reality. The book was published in France in French in 1951. It took Yourcenar 27 years. Why Hadrian? “If this man had not maintained peace in the world, and revived the economy of the empire, his personal fortunes and misfortunes would have moved me less.”

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Memoirs of Hadrian was written as a testamentary letter from the emperor Hadrian to his successor, the younger Marcus Aurelius.

In an attempt to manage risk tightly, most organizations still have an industrial approach to hiring.

This involves the formulation of increasingly more detailed task-oriented long descriptions of to do things for individual positions, which are then entered into systems still configured to spit out form letters in response to input.

Sometimes the content of the letter is out of sync with the actual experience —for example, when a note says:

“Thank you for interviewing with Vanguard. Although we were impressed with your background and qualifications, we have interviewed other candidates who more closely fit the needs of the position for which you interviewed.

Your resume will be kept on file, and if there is interest in your qualifications for other positions within Vanguard, you may be contacted for further consideration.

If you have any questions, please contact your recruiter directly as this mailbox is not monitored.”

And there was no interview. When a quick search pulls up that same position still open two months later, the best possible explanation is a glitch in the system.

Anyone curious about operational aspects of companies can run these kinds of experiments to see if what a company says in one conversation —as investor or customer, for example— is the experience it delivers in another. Like product and service reviews, recruiting is an area that can provide a lot of useful behavioral data.

This kind of research is useful to learn to be less wrong when we configure systems.

The problem of right or wrong

Thinking in absolutes, as in right or wrong, hides a more interesting question and opportunity. Which is what gets things right enough to matter? What boundaries should we explore in our systems to make them useful in understanding how the organization makes decisions? What's the impact of these decisions to its future?

An example of this type of question comes from John C. Bogle himself, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group. In Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life Bogle explores the boundaries in our relationship with money. He talks about the values we should emulate in our business and professional callings, and what we should consider as the true treasures in our lives.

The book came out at the culmination of the 2008 financial meltdown; timing matters to impact even when the principles are timeless. Enough communicates Bogle's investment philosophy and is the culmination of his talks over the years.

Why the title? For the curious among us, enough is the punch line from a delightful Kurt Vonnegut/Joseph Heller story:

“At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have ... enough.'”

“Central to the effective functioning of capitalism,” says Bogle, “was the fundamental principle of trusting and being trusted”—and that is disappearing:

“As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can’t be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a hindrance in evaluating the real-world economy.

It is character, not numbers, that make the world go ‘round. How can we possibly measure the qualities of human existence that give our lives and careers meaning? How about grace, kindness, and integrity? What value do we put on passion, devotion, and trust? How much do cheerfulness, the lilt of a human voice, and a touch of pride add to our lives? Tell me, please, if you can, how to value friendship, cooperation, dedication, and spirit.

Categorically, the firm that ignores the intangible qualities that the human beings who are our colleagues bring to their careers will never build a great workforce or a great organization.”

Why can't we just blame the system? “On balance, the financial system subtracts value from society,” says Bogle. But it is people who configure systems. When it comes to value and impact there is no such thing as an internal client that is not also an external one in terms of consequences.

Moving beyond obvious uses of technology

Systems stop being useful when they don't evolve to serve their purpose over time. They become circular, serving to keep things inside closed to the outside, or to prevent outside influences from making their way in. Increasingly, however, knowledge activates through interaction.

The “CrewCentral_noreply” email address added to the reference to a nonexistent recruiter in the email above clearly discouraged follow up. A dead end, a closed system designed to be one way.

Yet, there is abundant evidence of how open systems benefit from the collective input and exchange. Take Quora, for example —a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The platform continues to demonstrate we can learn much from interaction and feedback.

This is not about picking on any one organization, best practices make their way into too many of them, still. But the example above was the most interesting because it seemed to be a follow up to something that never happened.

Lest we think startups get these kind of things and the value of building culture right, I have enough examples collected over the last few years that show how we are still learning to walk the talk. Which is another way of saying connecting ideas with executions.

Rethinking recruiting

“In their efforts to avoid making a bad hire, organizations have created longer interview processes, with more meetings and steps along the way.”

[NOBL]

Although better interview formats are helpful, and algorithms are getting better at hiring low-skill service-sector jobs, for senior position many organizations still rely heavily on outside consultants. Recruiters are in turn somewhat limited to what they and their systems know.

This is why getting to the interview is still most of the battle. Candidates fight it in an evidence free environment where keywords and all to often politics are all there is to master. Asking a question when we know the answer doesn't help us learn something new.

In addition to personal and organizational biases, we have the disconnects that happen in communications. “The main difficulty of thinking is confusion,” says Dr. Edward de Bono, father of lateral thinking. “We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope, and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls.”

Things are still this way because looking at skills more holistically is hard, and our systems are not configured to think. People are. Were we to ask any number of people whether they think of themselves as spare parts, we would likely learn most people see themselves as whole beings —skills and experience as part of a continuum.

Further, corporate life in an increasingly complex environment where rapid change is the norm is more about learning together and becoming comfortable with improvisation, a prerequisite to exploring new territory.

Building capacity rather than fitting people into a narrower definition of work holds enormous benefits for organizations. Systems are built on self-fulfilling premises tend to flag data that fits similar patterns rather than find novel combinations —to discover more of the same rather than identify new opportunities.

Many organizations are thus literally stuck into repeating what used to work with little to no possible variations. It's possible that some enlightened business leader or hands-on hiring manager steps out of automation and goes direct. It is also possible that they are experienced in interviewing.

Stepping out and going for it is doing something that doesn't scale. Possible, but all too rare. The prevalent metaphor in business is still that of getting on the bus.

When we seek exponential results, we should also become more open to doing things differently.

Most fits that seem obvious looking back are anything but when we look into the future. While we embrace innovation as a concept, we often overlook the impact of small and simple tweaks in the way we do things. What does success look like? When we put more thought into defining the problem we're trying to solve, our results improve even as the process may still be wanting.

A job is not an island. Adding the context from diverse inputs and points of view from the groups and teams that benefit in adding a member to their network can make it easier for people to get a sense of the connections to what is important. Roles evolve, but there is usually a starting point. Gaining insight into what matters most can contribute to stronger matches.

Technology is transforming the career market, yet many organizations seem to be missing the action. Identifying the whole thinkers and doers who can help imagine the organization's future while they do today's work well is not easy.

At around the same time Bogle's book was published, technologist Clay Shirky argued that information overload wasn't the problem tech journalism made it out to be. Information failure is filter failure, he says.

Some things —for example the past— can be more easily measured and defined. How we go about setting the filters says a lot more about the organization and its culture than it does about the skills and talent of potential candidates.

Where can algorithms help? Algorithms, says Esko Kilpi, “can create enabling constraints in four areas: (1) the volume and (2) the value of contributions, (3) the reputation of contributors and (4) diversity of thinking.”

But not when we use them to search a database of resumes that become history and old news the moment they are archived. Our contributions are all over the Internet.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.